The Poisoned Earth

‘On a Farther Shore,’ by William Souder

On the bookshelves of many a contemporary environmental journalist looms at least one canonical text she’s hesitant to read. For this reviewer, it was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” among the gloomiest books ever written, an unrelenting catalog of crimes committed by man against nature. But after reading William Souder’s engrossing new biography of Carson, “On a Farther Shore,” I returned to the book and discovered its central message to be — depressingly — timeless. Substitute organic pesticides and herbicides with the endocrine-­disrupting compounds found in everyday household items or the creep of chemicals used in hydrof­racking, and you may experience the same hair-prickling alarm felt by Carson’s readers 50 years ago.

“Silent Spring” was a clarion call that helped pave the way toward establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, tighter controls on the use of chemicals and other regulatory achievements. But success for its unassuming and enigmatic middle-aged author was no fluke, as Souder makes abundantly clear. By the time Carson signed her contract for this book, she had written scores of magazine and newspaper articles and three best-selling books about the sea, one of which, the lyrical “Sea Around Us,” had been serialized in The New Yorker. She was considered the nation’s pre-eminent nature writer. Her great themes, novel to many Americans at the time, were the biological forces that link all life through the ages, the interdependence of living organisms and the continual cycling of nutrients and genetic material through species and over time.

Before Carson became a superstar of narrative nonfiction — showered with awards, honorary degrees and speaking offers — she was a mild-mannered government drone who spent 16 years writing press releases and pamphlets for what eventually became the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a perfect job for a biophiliac (Carson was an avid bird-watcher) who excelled at doing homework and massaging experts for information. (Though Carson had a master’s in zoology, she never worked as a scientist. And while she felt drawn to the sea and specialized in matters oceanic, she spent little time on the water, rarely ventured deeper than her ankles and never corrected the media’s presumption that she was a frequent diver.)

But even as Carson churned out propaganda, she was reading and collecting government reports on the unintended consequences of pesticide use. By 1946, she had serious doubts not only about pesticides’ safety but about government’s ability — or will — to protect environmental health over economic interests. By the summer of 1962, when The New Yorker excerpted three chapters of “Silent Spring,” her audience was primed for science-and-technology-related anxiety. Americans knew about birth defects caused by thalidomide, a supposedly safe drug; they’d weathered a “cranberry scare,” in which pesticide-contaminated fruit was pulled from the market just days before Thanksgiving; and they’d learned to “duck and cover” in anticipation of a nuclear attack.

Carson artfully linked radioactive fallout with the indiscriminate use of pesticides; they were, Souder writes, the “twin fears of the modern age.” The parallels between the chemicals were, to Carson, exact and inescapable: both were invisible, acutely toxic, mutagenic and had effects that could last for generations. Such negative impacts, Carson believed, were the consequence of the “impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.”

Photo

Rachel Carson testifies before a Senate subcommittee studying pesticides, June 1963.Credit
United Press International

Carson had a knack for encapsulating big ideas and for saying exactly what she meant. Her voice could be clear and plain (“The problem that concerns us here . . . ”) or poetical (she feared “a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight”). But none of this came easily. Souder paints Carson as an obsessive reviser and a meticulous researcher who was often blocked, she said, by her uneasiness that human beings had acquired the power to reshape the world so profoundly.

Souder is at his best when he places Carson’s intellectual development in context with the nascent environmental movement. The storm over “Silent Spring,” he notes, was a “cleaving point” in history when the “gentle, optimistic proposition called ‘conservation’ began its transformation into the bitterly divisive idea that would come to be known as ‘environmentalism.’” (Souder isn’t shy about expressing his own disappointment with what he views as a permanent wall between partisans, with nature and science pitted against an “unbreakable coalition of government and industry, the massed might of the establishment.”)

As Carson and her publisher expected, the chemical industry pounced on “Silent Spring” — even as it climbed best-seller lists — for overstating the downside and ignoring the upsides of pesticides. (Souder quotes Carson directly defending herself only once. California, one of the few states with accurate records, she said, was reporting “as many as 1,000 accidental poisonings a year.” That might be good enough for Souder, but we never learn if the victims were crickets, catbirds or campesinos.) More significant, because they linger to this day, were the attacks that cast ecology as a subversive subject and Carson as a Communist. To love nature, in this absolutist paradigm, is to abhor business, to reject capitalism and by extension America itself. One chemical company claimed that by condemning pesticides (in fact, the book argued only for limits and restraint in their use), Carson hoped to reduce our food supply to “East-curtain parity.”

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Souder writes vividly and with great empathy for his subject and her cause. But steeped in Carsoniana, he occasionally slips into her old-fashioned locutions (“And so you see that . . . ”), or even into grandiosity (Carson has “the voice of someone standing above this elemental environment and feeling within it the slow pulse of geologic time and the mighty force of evolution that lies inside and beyond the surging waters”). One wishes, also, that the author had paid more attention to gender politics: he doesn’t explain how Carson managed to write four intensely researched books while running a household, managing the financial affairs of her family and, later, raising her orphaned grandnephew. Nor does he fully explore Carson’s unconventional romantic arrangement. He sketches the outlines of her 11-year intimate relationship with a married woman named Dorothy Freeman but fails to explain how or if Freeman’s husband, Stanley, dealt with it.

But these points detract little from an absorbing narrative. In Souder’s telling, almost every aspect of Carson’s life and times becomes captivating: her difficult personal circumstances (she grew up in rural poverty, was the sole breadwinner in her family and battled breast cancer while writing and then defending “Silent Spring”); the publishing milieu; and the continuing friction between those who would preserve nature versus those who would bend it to provide utility for man.

Souder warms up slowly, presenting Carson as a mild and mousy girl who fell into her career thanks to a charismatic mentor. As she matured, however, Carson quietly simmered with attitude, indignation and, once she became more successful, a righteous ego. Released from government service and financial peril, she roared at the forces she believed were destroying nature, her greatest source of pleasure and the thing without which, to pervert the classic advertising slogan of the agricultural chemical manufacturer Monsanto, life itself would be impossible.

ON A FARTHER SHORE

The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson

By William Souder

Illustrated. 496 pp. Crown Publishers. $30.

Elizabeth Royte is the author of “Garbage Land” and “Bottlemania.”

A version of this review appears in print on September 16, 2012, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Poisoned Earth. Today's Paper|Subscribe